About Us

Overview

Factual is a location platform that enables personalized and contextually relevant mobile experiences by enriching mobile location signals with definitive global data. Factual’s real-time data stack builds and maintains data on a global scale, with Factual's core
Global Places
data covering over 65 million local businesses and points of interest in 50 countries. Factual’s platform also provides location based mobile personalization and ad-targeting solutions along with data cleaning and mapping services for business listings and points of interest.

The Data

Our real-time data stack is constantly processing new data contributions that flow in from millions of sources to update and improve the data on an ongoing basis. Factual partners are a key source of data as many of them provide edits and updates back to Factual. The data stack:

Extracts both unstructured and structured data from the various different sources

Cleans, standardizes, and canonicalizes the data

Merges, de-dupes, and maps entities across the multiple sources

Our History

Factual was founded in 2008 by Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics (which launched ASI’s AdSense product). Applied Semantics was acquired by Google in 2003, and Gil continued with Google until he left to found Factual. Gil has long believed that making data accessible will enable more innovative tools and applications. To that end, he set out to develop an open data platform in an effort to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and accessibility.